Disney originality and remakes
So... one thing that I've found incredibly interesting as of late is Disney's streak of remaking literally anything and everything into a live action movie. We've already been through 101 Dalmatians; ''two ''Alice in Wonderlands; The Jungle Book; Beauty and the Beast; Pete's Dragon and Maleficent (kinda). And we'll be hit with Mary Poppins and Mulan and The Little Mermaid and The Lion King and Snow White and 101 Dalmatians (again) and Aladdin and Peter Pan and Dumbo and Winnie the Pooh and wow, how did this get this bad? I do legitimately find these live action remakes a problem. For various reasons. Let's start with the one I'm the most apprehensive about - The Lion King. So... they're making a live action movie where virtually every character needs to be animated in CGI. So... I guess that this means that Dinosaur is also a live action movie - another movie that had CGI characters in front of live action backgrounds. If The Lion King is bad, I will do an animated atrocity of it and I will not be stretching my definition of "animation" like I would if I reviewed a puppet-based show. Beyond that, my problem is one that is shared with a couple of others - Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, ''and ''Mulan. These movies are all around 25 years old. In some cases, the people who saw these movies in theaters are too young to be working on their remakes. A part of me feels like there should be some kind of statue of limitations on remakes - and we'll be getting to that in a moment. Regardless if these movies are good or bad, they continually feel like hollow, soulless money-grabbing gestures. You want to cash in on the success and nostalgia of The Lion King, and yet you still play that movie in theaters on occasion. I'm more lenient of movies that are over 50 years old like Dumbo ''and ''Snow White. Hell, remake Pinnochio if you want. However, there is one exception here - their remake of the Fantasia ''segment - ''Night on Bald Mountain. The concept of remaking a part of Fantasia in live action immediately misses the point of the concept of Fantasia. ''That movie was designed to put classical music to animation. I dunno, it just feels disrespectful to say "we need a live action version of a movie that was specifically designed to be animated." I mean... technically they did this with ''The Sorcerer's Apprentice ''in 2010... but I really do mean ''technically. I have little problems with many of the other movies too. For example, I hear that in the remake of Mulan, they're not going to be using the songs. Which is ridiculous. That's not because the songs are awesome and it has one of the best soundtracks in Disney history. (Well, not just because that). For example, Girl with Fighting For and especially I'll Make a Man Out of You - they do what musical numbers should do - they reasonably allow the plot to move on faster. Without I'll Make a Man Out of You, they'll need to dedicate a lot of time to training scenes (which isn't the point of the movie) unless they use a training montage... and if you do that, why not use the song? In Mulan all of the songs reflect and strengthen the themes of the movie - bringing honor to your family and societal expectations. They have a purpose and they can't just be sutured out of the movie. Speaking of which, a lot of what makes Aladdin work is the genie played by Robin Williams specifically. I cannot imagine that movie without him. The last time they tried to replace Robin Williams with someone else in the roll, we got Return of Jafar, which wasn't "Dan Castelleneta playing the genie." It was "Dan Castelleneta trying to play Robin Williams trying to play the genie." With 101 Dalmatians, you already did this song and dance. You know, that "we're taking one of our old films and showing it from the side of the villain." Yeah... I mean, the original Dalmatians was from the 50's. The live action remake was from the 90's. And Maleficient, ''which is the actual story they're trying to tell again was made this decade. ''The Little Mermaid is going to have the same problem that Cinderella did - the source material had a protagonist that had outdated values to our current time, and it puts them in a bad situation where they either have to change things and piss off the people they're trying to attract or don't change things and piss off everyone else. And, half measures don't work in this scenario. So, here's the question - why is Disney doing this? I mean, I'd suppose one answer is "because they make lots of money" and they do. They make a lot of money. However, none of them have really hit the mass zeitgeist. Like, people aren't going to think of this year's Beauty and the Beast as "Beauty and the Beast." And none of these movies will hit the level of Frozen. And I don't think that it's solely because of originality or lack thereof. I mean, Frozen is an adaptation of a Hans Christen Anderson princess fairy tale. And even something like Zootopia isn't the first cop/detective movie starring a rabbit about prejudice where someone gets framed with a horrible crime that they didn't commit... made by Disney. I mean... Disney is good at adaptations. That's what they do. It's what they built themselves on. The first full animated film that Disney created entirely without a source material, I think was Lady and the Tramp (1955) the package films. Dumbo, Pinnochio, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan... they were all based on books. Fantasia was an adaptation of music. Most after Lady and the Tramp were also adaptations, not just in animation. For instance, Roger Rabbit was based on a novel. Many movies are based on traditional stories or legends - Hercules and Mulan. The Lion King was based on Hamlet. A lack of originality isn't the problem. In fact, too much originality can be a problem - one of the biggest problems with Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is that it took too many deviations from the source material, even more than American McGee's Alice in Wonderland. But... why does "Disney remaking Hamlet" sound like a much worse idea than "Disney remaking The Lion King." Well... because The Lion King was based on Hamlet and you already remade that. The problem is that Disney is running out of source material, and this is their own damn fault and they should feel very bad about this. And I know that they're desperate for source material. Remember a couple of years back where they bought everything from LucasFilm to Marvel to Maker Studios? They were buying up everything they can to have new source material. I've said this before, and it's one thing that Disney is most infamous for - their stranglehold on the public domain. If you don't know, the public domain is basically a rule that states after a certain time, a creator's work can be used by anyone for whatever they want. Right now, the law is "if something was made after Steamboat Willie, it can never be placed in the public domain." That's not strictly true, but for all intents and purposes it may as well be true. The aggravating part is that... according to the current law, a few of Disney's animated films wouldn't have been able to have been made. For example, the original Alice in Wonderland movie. Lewis Carrol died in 1898. 75 years after that date is 1973. Disney's Alice in Wonderland was made 1951. There are a couple of other films like that in the lineup. And if Lewis Carrol didn't appoint anyone the rights in his will, Disney couldn't have asked anyone for the rights and the work would be in limbo (which is why "the death of the creator" is an abjectly stupid barometer of when something falls into public domain, instead of a set year). Back when Disney started, the rule was "56 years after creation of the work" as opposed to the now "life time of the author (let's say 80 years) + 70 years after the death of the author" So about 150 years realistically after creation. And the previous laws were way better. Like, lifetime of the author is the absolute maximum that should have ever been allowed. If you die... you really can't reap the benefits of your copyright, can you? I know that there are certain exceptions - like people posthumously giving their earnings to charity. But we can't make rules on exceptions. Dogs do kill people, so... perhaps we should ban dogs. It would prevent the problem of dogs killing people. And the creators who did give rights to people who could have used the money don't balance out the people who basically died giving their rights to no one and leaving their work in limbo. Rod Sterling isn't benefiting off The Twilight Zone, which would be in the public domain by now if Disney Corp hadn't messed with the rules, and his stories would be inspiring more upcoming creators and thus make his works more and more enduring. There are a lot of things that have entered collective consciousness, with their authors being long dead, and should be allowed to be used more and more - Lord of the Rings for instance. On a similar note - Chronicles of Narnia. But beyond that, there's To Kill a Mockingbird, Psycho, Ocean's 11, the first episodes of The Flintstones, Goldfinger, Ben-Hur, Rocky & Bullwinkle - ''instances where the only people making money off of them are corporate shills who do nothing but keep them out of the hands of the public. Personally, when I die, everything I create will be released into public domain upon my death because... why the hell not? Like... why not? That is a legit question. Fuck, I'd even be happy with the 56 years thing. If I hadn't created something in 56 years that could support me/I could be happy with; then there really would be no point. I'll be spending my life trying to create as many things as possible, trying to make them as good as possible before that moment. Because of the laws that they helped create, Disney doesn't have much of a choice but to keep remaking their own films and buying up a bunch of new things. There are definitely works that they want to remake that they can't (like ''Wicked for instance), although it's hard to know because... remakes and adaptations actually benefit the memory of a creator and a work (as long as the remaker/adapter cares about what they're doing). Do you think that we'd still be talking about Alice in Wonderland if it wasn't remade a million different times? Maybe, because that's been remade a lot. But... how many of you didn't know that Dumbo or Roger Rabbit was based on a book? What about Jaws? The Secret of NIMH? Honestly, it's one of the reasons that The Last Airbender is a special kind of awful - that it had the power to launch the franchise into an even wider culture. I really hope that Disney at some point realizes that they can't keep fucking up the public domain and keep what has made them successful. These remakes have worked, but they won't work forever. I mean, at some point they're going to run out of movies to make live-action versions of. Then maybe in 50 years, they'll make an animated version of the live action The Lion King, based on the animated version, based on a play. Remember, one of the biggest complaints of The Force Awakens is that it's too similar to what's been done before. That makes sense, Disney remakes things and adapts things. Why wouldn't it be similar to the things that have already been done? What do I think they should be... besides, you know, not fucking shit up for everyone with lobbying money? Well... remake their failures. I'm not kidding on this one. I don't feel that there's any necessary reason to remake movies that are already good, like Lion King or Poltergeist. I think more people should start remaking movies that failed, and giving them new life. For example - what if Disney, now actually comfortable with making PG-13 movies, made a modern rendition of The Black Cauldron. They could do a really good job with that and people wouldn't mind the changes that need to be made. It sounds counter-intuitive (so I know a marketing hack will never, ever do it), but I have a feeling that the best remake ever made will be of something that was originally awful. How many things were created by visionaries with great ideas, but no technical know-how? Sure, some horrible movies are just incomprehensible messes that you can't do anything with, but there is a large middle area. But seriously, stop the lobbying to erode the public domain and there will be no remake problem. Which is another thing that sounds counter-intuitive, I guess. Category:Miscellaneous